[a1369209993]

I'm not disagreeing, just showing code to illustrate why memcpy doesn't work for this. Although I do disagree that writing a signed value is useful - you can eliminate 18 of those variations with a single intmax_t-to-twos-complement-uintmax_t function (if you drop undefined behaviour for (unsigned foo_t)some_signed_foo this becomes a no-op). A set of sext_uintN functions would also eliminate 18 read-signed versions. Any optimizing compiler can trivially fuse sext_uint32(read_uint32le2(buf)), and minimal implementations would have less boilerplate to chew through.

[flatfinger]

> Although I do disagree that writing a signed value is useful

Although the Standard defines the behavior of signed-to-unsigned conversion in a way that would yield the same bit pattern as a two's-complement signed number, some compilers will issue warnings if a signed value is implicitly coerced to unsigned. Adding the extra 18 forms would generally require nothing more than defining an extra 24 macros, which seems like a reasonable way to prevent such issues.

[a1369209993]

Fair point; even if the combinatorical nature of it is superficially alarming, that's probably not a productive area to worry about feature creep in.

[flatfinger]

72 static in-line functions. If a compiler does a good job of handling such things efficiently, most of them could be accommodated by chaining to another function once or twice (e.g. to read a 64-bit value that's known to be at least 16-bit aligned, on a platform that doesn't support unaligned reads, read and combine two 32-bit values that are known to be 16-bit likewise).

Far less bloat than would be needed for a compiler to recognize and optimize any meaningful fraction of the ways people might write code to work around the lack of portably-specified library functions.